Plans to Alter ERIC Set Off Alarms

In the perennial struggle to move educational research from the
ivory tower to the field, the Educational Resources Information Center,
or ERIC, has been at the forefront for more than 35 years. With more
than a million reports, studies, hearing transcripts, and other pieces
of information in its archives, the federal database system is the
largest, longest-running, and best-known electronic education
library.

It's not, however, as efficient as it could be, according to the
U.S. Department of Education, which last month floated a controversial
proposal to remake the entire system. The department's ideas, published
on April 10, have touched off a flood of protests from ERIC users.

Before the official comment period on the proposal ended on May 9,
nearly 4,000 of the system's customers and supporters had weighed in on
the changes. Among those opposing the plans were at least 28 Democratic
members of Congress and more than 46 national education organizations,
ranging from the National PTA to the American Library Association.

At issue, they say, is whether the proposed changes would ultimately
enhance the public's access to needed information on education—or
wind up restricting it.

"We have substantial concerns," wrote the Washington-based American
Educational Research Association, that "the proposed 'new' ERIC will
simply dismantle the system."

Most everyone agrees that the far-flung, $10.5 million-a-year system
badly needs an overhaul; it has operated largely unchanged since its
founding in 1966.

To improve it, Education Department officials want to hand it over
to a single contractor, thus eliminating the 16 independent,
subject-matter-oriented clearinghouses that now are its backbone. The
department's proposal also envisions eliminating some customer
services, setting standards for the material that goes into the
archives, and introducing technological enhancements so that users can
get quicker, easier, round-the-clock access to information.

"It's just a creaky system that was developed and functioned
wonderfully in a paper era," said Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, the
director of the department's Institute of Education Sciences, which
oversees ERIC. "It is not functioning so efficiently in an electronic
era."

'Distributed' Knowledge

To the system's longtime supporters, though, phasing out the
clearinghouses is like throwing the baby out with the bath water. They
say the clearinghouses, most of which are housed on university
campuses, serve dual roles: They provide expertise in selecting
materials and steering customers to exactly the right documents, and
they build a client base through their Web sites, services, and
publications.

"A database alone, without that infrastructure, would be a
tremendous loss," said Felice J. Levine, the AERA' s executive
director.

Lee G. Burchinal, ERIC's architect, said that from the start, the
system's "distributed" structure set it apart from the centralized
information-gathering systems used by other federal agencies in the
1960s. Faced with a budget too small to pay for a top-notch,
centralized system, he recalled, "we said, 'OK, we'll have to go to the
experts in research where they are.' "

The arrangement also made the system more politically palatable, he
said, lessening the education world's suspicions that Washington
bureaucrats would be handpicking its contents.

The Education Department's proposal, in comparison, calls for the
new operator of the ERIC system to draw on the advice of a limited
number of content experts—three for every subject covered by the
clearinghouses—on an advisory basis.

One of the more popular services the clearinghouses offer is
AskERIC, which is also proposed for the chopping block. Providing
personalized answers to educators' questions, the service is a key
portal into the system for lay people, its defenders say.

"It's the difference between searching the holdings database and
teasing out what one needs from hundreds of options and being led to
exactly the correct shelf by the library staff," Sally McConnell, the
assistant executive director for government relations for the National
Association of Elementary School Principals, wrote in a letter to the
department.

But Mr. Whitehurst noted that the responses that customers get
through the service are not very different from the results of any
other database search. With a more user-friendly system, he said,
people should be able to conduct searches themselves, just as they do
with Google and other Internet search engines.

Customers are also rallying to retain the ERIC Digests, which
summarize research on particular topics. Although that service is
important, some digests are redundant and inaccurate, according to Mr.
Whitehurst. For instance, he said, his staff found five different
digests on bullying, written by four different clearinghouses, over a
five-year period ending in 2001.

"We're having talks now," he added, "to see if there's another way
to provide that function."

'Wheat From Chaff'

The proposal's call for restricting the periodicals in the database
to only "approved" education journals and for setting guidelines for
determining which materials to include in the database also is setting
off alarm bells among some groups. They fear the changes could narrow
the range of materials available through the system.

"You're not going to find the best research and information on
education only in education journals," said Jim Kohlmoos, the president
of the National Education Knowledge Industry Association, which
represents the clearinghouses. "It makes people awfully nervous when
you're trying to create restrictions that could lead to ideological
bias."

Yet some policy experts say that the sheer quantity of information
available through ERIC inhibits access to good information.

"It's like a vacuum cleaner," said Christopher T. Cross, who was the
Education Department's assistant secretary for research from 1989 to
1991, during the first Bush administration. "It's gathered up a
tremendous amount of material in the field, but it's also made it hard
for users to distinguish the wheat from the chaff."

"I think, in fact, these changes could end up with a much more
coherent system—one that is much more accessible in the field to
people who want to use it," Mr. Cross said.

A final decision on what the system will look like will come after
Education Department staff members have had a chance to analyze the
letters the department has received. Contracts for the current
clearinghouses end in December. A new ERIC system is expected to be up
and running by next year.

"We knew people had strong feelings about this," Mr. Whitehurst
said. "We wanted to hear what they had to say."

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